Angry Voice - I remember when I first met you, you were upset (to say the least) about having to leave your weapons (guns) behind in Germany when you set up home on St Kilda Rd. Can you let the blog readers in on your thoughts? Who should have guns and why?
Angry says... The truth is, everyone - I mean every citizen - should have the right to own guns.
I know that the knee jerk reaction of most in Europe and Australia is to unthinkingly moan and whimper (Oh No!) whilst hiding their brow under a shielding palm or two, meaningfully shaking heads, but the hard fact is that governments are historically the absolute most dangerous things on Earth, and that free gun ownership by the people is the absolute last, powerful rampart that stands between dictatorship, nay between genocide, and us .... Read more.
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The truth is, everyone - I mean every citizen - should have the right to own guns.
I know that the knee jerk reaction of most in Europe and Australia is to unthinkingly moan and whimper (Oh No!) whilst hiding their brow under a shielding palm or two, meaningfully shaking heads, but the hard fact is that governments are historically the absolute most dangerous things on Earth, and that free gun ownership by the people is the absolute last, powerful rampart that stands between dictatorship, nay between genocide, and us.
Not here ! I'll hear you say. More on that in a minute - but in the meantime I'll simper and retch.
But first - it's not all . As in all things, there are non linear consequences, and in the case of guns they tend to be all positive - for instance, guns have de-infantilising effects on a population. The presence of guns around is a way whereby life says out loud: this is for keeps, man. This is not a joke. Actions have consequences, life is for real, and sometimes there are no second chances, so be careful, be an adult when you act and when you deal. This is for keeps.
Why is it that the US of A is the one country I happened to drive, where people in cars and on the road were the most polite, the most considerate? Yielding politely with a wave, never cutting in badly, never flipping the bird? I drove in countries in civilized old Europe where instant tripwire trigger blind braindead road rage was the norm. Dare try that in the USA at your peril: 30% of glove compartments hold a gun. Grow up, man. Be polite. Respect other citizens. Be an upstanding, decent community man or woman. Or you'll stand in sundering danger.
But hey - this is secondary. The kernel of it all, as we shall see, is not.
Going back to the de-infantilizing bit - well, you'll say, precisely not - not adults, but teenagers out there commit crimes with guns, etc.
Nope. Crimes committed by teenagers (yes, that includes Columbine et al.), accidents within families who have guns, are far rarer than is commonly believed. e.g.: Fact: In New York City, there are 3.5 million guns owned by adults. The city has 2.6 million children under the age of 10. Yet accidental gun deaths in that age group average 1.2 a year - statistically nil - in a city like NYC, warts and all.
The other thing is - we're talking here lawful ownership. Most such crimes are committed by illegally acquired and held handguns, so that the effect of gun laws is not relevant here. One is reminded of John Howard's ridiculous knee jerk reaction when a shooting happened on the streets of Melbourne last year, blabbering about wanting to tighten yet further our gun laws here : the shooting had occurred by an illegal weapon, but hey - we're a tad confused, so let's confuse the public a whit further too, shan't we?
At any rate: Genocide.
The one common thread in all the numerous cases of genocide worldwide - still continuing right now, heard of Darfur ? is that the populations and people at risk either were unarmed, or had been disarmed prior by their own governments.
Because I lived for years in Brussels, Rwanda's old colonial power, I got to know and befriend some people you eventually got caught up and murdered in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and I'm still bleeding (I still know some escapees who are now permanently in Brussels. Should we ever go together to Europe, I would have to introduce you. Beautiful people. Great people. Who escaped being hacked to death by machetes while standing by the skin of their teeth. Most - 99.9% at least - others did not. Lost for ever to mankind, to you and me and the world we live in. Because they were unarmed.)
There have been so many genocides during the last century - all of them perpetrated against defenseless, un-beweaponed populations. I can go through the whole horrifying list - the smallest of them, the so-called rape of Nanking in 1937, was archetypal of such things: the Japanese Army marched into a defenseless city, and over the course of six months went through a rampage / orgy of rapes and murders. By the time the Japanese left 6 months later - they had wantonly, for fun, blithely tortured and killed half the population of 600,000 people. And, you would not want to have, to live through and sleep through, the nightmares of the remaining half.
And you would not want to be the perp either: they have nightmares too. A croatian Serb killer was interviewed on Danish TV recently. What he said was striking: "I envy the last alcoholic, the last hobo tramp who sleeps under bridges at night and fossicks in garbage cans to eat and cadges a few cents with which to dring cheap wine. He has not killed. I would give all I could to be him. I admire him." If the Croatian civilians he helped slaughter had been armed - he would not have become a perp to the extent he did. Being armed is two-way respect: it prevents one to become a victim. It prevents another one from becoming a criminal. There can be no better handling than preventing Hitler from becoming Hitler, PolPot from becoming Pol Pot, Mao from becoming Mao, the blithe feller of some 70 million hapless people.
The 20th century roster of genocides is very lengthy - from the relatively small - Tibet, 1959, 2 million dead - to the very large scale (China, Mao years, 70 millions) through the mid-scale, Cambodia, Germany, Armenia, Croatia, Ukraine 1938, and so many others that the mind boggles, the heart skips and stutters, and shame sets in that somehow, we are genetically related to the spineless pieces of smelly horrid goo who pretend to be people and who do these things.
Please do not believe that this cannot affect Australia: Read e.g. Bob Wurth's book, "Saving Australia", and shudder at how close we came to being invaded by the selfsame then- brutal, nitwit, illiterate Army that did the job in Nanking (and if you believe that could not happen today .... Remember one year ago, in an unrelated case, when Japan was accused - and recognized - that its fleet had illegally caught 2 billion dollars' worth of Yellowfish Tuna in Australian waters, driving the species to the brink of extinction ? Well, when confronted, the Japanese Government representative basically shrugged and said: "So what ? We stole the fish. Yes, true. But you, Anglo Saxons, stole the whole country of Australia". Could it be that somewhere, Japan is collectively still sore they did not invade Australia (or before, or after, Captain Cook did.) All it would take for Australia to be at risk would be a condition of exception in the world. I can give you many scenarios under which this so-called 'condition of exception' could happen: for instance: the Yellowstone Super Volcano blows. That would totally hobble the US and turn certain areas of the world - certainly including ours - into lawless free-for-all zones.
There are other scenarios .... Reality is a harsh mistress.
Now how can we halt genocides ? All studies say the same thing: the only way is that the populations at risk be armed.
Darfur today demonstrates again both the truth of those studies, and the utter impotence of all other well-meaning measures. Rwanda did too, before that. May I also remind you, the smallest-scale slaughter in the history of genocides (Nanking, again) still has killed far more people than the total number of people killed by gun-related crime worldwide since guns were invented. So who are you to deny the right to bear arms? How, in the name of one untested, reality-removed principle, can you thereby ensure that hundred of thousands will continue to be killed by their own governments in the horrors still to come? Let the people be able to defend themselves, and if the price to pay for this is an occasional drunken brawl shoot out, so what?
Now for real world studies and statistics.
Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, demonstrates in a study acceped by the US government as containing valid statistics that 2.5 million people every year defend themselves successfully by brandishing their guns before would-be attackers - burglars, rapists, assholes.
John R Lott, in his book "More guns, less Crime" (he started out wanting to demonstrate the opposite of what he ended up demonstrating: the fact that gun ownership is on balance a positive factor in society) quotes his figure that 200,000 women defend themselves successfully against attempted sexual assault every year in the US.
Ironically, it seems that those who are against gun ownership by citizens just have made a career out of this (the same as in certain fields of Science, when researchers cling on to discredited theories long after the theories have been shown to not work, because their whole careers were predicated on it.) The name of Carl Rowan of the Washington Post springs to mind, a rabid ad vocate of a total ban on guns including their manufacture, who ..... once shot a teenager taking a dip in his swimming pool with an unregistered pistol.
One last observation: the one country that might very well start WW3 today is Iran.
Its president has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, and is widely thought to be pursuing a nuclear program to give him the means to vaporize Israel. Now the way Iranians are cowed into silence and into following the "leader" (exactly as was done in Germany from 1933 on) is through systematic terrorizing of the population: this horrid, massive-scale terrorizing would simply not be possible if the population were armed. In one fell swoop, the non negligible danger of a new world war started by fanatical types would be eliminated. People are picked up off the streets because they do not dress well, by people from the government who drive around in vans and observe whether passers-by and pedestrians cleave properly to the mandated dress codes. Maybe for the sake of democracy, for the sake of not allowing these people who drive around in vans and presume to snatch people off the streets, just maybe it would behoove the cause of democracy if on one such occasion a firefight took place and made a stand for democracy, and for respecting the people.
Read /www.iranfocus.com on occasion or, for instance, this recent article by the Telegraph in London:
Iran's hangmen work overtime to silence opposition
The Daily Telegraph
Fri. 24 Aug 2007
By Con Coughlin
Stonings, hangings, floggings, purges. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might claim that United Nations sanctions can't hurt his country, but that is not how it feels for Iran's long-suffering population which now finds itself on the receiving end of one of the most brutal purges witnessed since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The most visible manifestation of the new oppression sweeping Iran has been the wave of public executions and floggings carried out in Teheran and provincial capitals over recent weeks in a blatant attempt by the regime to intimidate political opponents. The official government line is that the punishments are part of its "Plan to Enforce Moral Behaviour".
It's the same kind of argument that was used immediately after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took control to purge the country of its prosperous, secular middle class and secure his hold on power. Now Mr Ahmadinejad is adopting similar tactics in a desperate attempt to keep his embattled regime in power.
Although Iran has one of the world's highest execution rates, until recently most of the sentences were carried out within the confines of prisons such a Teheran's notorious Evin complex. But this month diplomats at the Japanese and Australian embassies in the capital were alarmed to find the bodies of two convicted criminals hanging from cranes stationed directly outside their office windows.
The location of the cranes, at a busy thoroughfare surrounded by office blocks, was chosen as much to remind the diplomatic community that Mr Ahmadinejad's hardline regime was still very much in charge as to send a message to ordinary citizens.
For these public executions, together with the estimated 30 others that have taken place in other parts of the country, are nothing more than a brutal exercise in political, as opposed to religious, persecution. There have also been several public floggings carried out on men and women accused of flouting the strict morality laws. Many of the executions were shown live on Iranian television. The message the government wants to get across is clear: mess with us and this is what will happen to you.
However much the authorities insist the sentences relate only to their campaign to improve public morals, Western diplomats in Teheran believe many of the victims have been singled out for their participation in the anti-government fuel riots that erupted in late June.
Those disturbances, in which an estimated third of the country's petrol stations were destroyed by protesters angry at the introduction of fuel rationing (Iran, remember, boasts the world's second largest oil reserves), can be seen as a direct consequence of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations over Iran's controversial nuclear programme.
It was the first serious challenge the regime encountered since setting itself on a collision course with the West following Mr Ahmadinejad's surprise election as president two years ago. So it is no coincidence that the past two months have seen a dramatic increase in the execution rate.
Far from being pressured into changing tack on Iran's nuclear programme, Mr Ahmadinejad's regime remains determined to pursue the holy grail of uranium enrichment. It is even prepared to take extreme measures to silence domestic opposition, while at the same time placing loyal supporters of the regime under intense pressure to ensure the country's nuclear programme is not unduly affected by the UN sanctions.
In this respect, the deal agreed this week between Teheran and the United Nations-sponsored International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Vienna-based organisation responsible for monitoring Iran's "peaceful" nuclear programme, should be taken with a pinch of salt.
The official line from Teheran is that it is now prepared to readmit teams of UN nuclear experts to its top secret nuclear facilities and help clear up a number of issues relating to the development programme. This includes determining what small traces of weapons-grade uranium were doing at a facility that the Iranians insist is part of their nuclear power programme, which does not require uranium to be enriched to such a high level. But many diplomats suspect this is just another Iranian ploy to string out the UN while pressing ahead with its nuclear ambitions.
Certainly there appears to have been no let-up in Iran's quest to acquire sophisticated uranium enrichment technology irrespective of the effects of sanctions. According to reports recently received by Western security sources, Iran has been concentrating its efforts on acquiring tens of thousands of highly specialised magnets that are an important component in the successful operation of the gas centrifuges that are used for uranium enrichment.
Until the imposition of the UN sanctions this year Teheran had been able to buy industrial magnets from European Union countries. Now they are having to buy them on the black market, and are making intensive efforts to acquire the equipment illegally from former Soviet republics and the Far East. It's all crucial if the Iranians want to enrich uranium to a level that can be used for nuclear warheads.
The Iranians' determination to get the magnets and other sophisticated industrial equipment has led Reza Tahmasebi, Iran's minister of industries and mines who was given responsibility for acquiring the magnets, to tender his resignation. When it comes to Iran's nuclear programme, Mr Ahmadinejad clearly wants results, not excuses.
Mr Tahmasebi is just one of several prominent officials who have found themselves out of a job because of their failure to help Mr Ahmadinejad escape the more punitive affects of the UN economic sanctions.
The governor of Iran's Central Bank, Ibrahim Shibani, is reported to have been relieved of his duties for failing to supervise adequately the return of Iranian overseas assets before they could be frozen, and dozens of other senior officials have lost their jobs as the regime seeks to tighten its grip over the entire apparatus of government.
None of which is good news for those who still cling to the notion that the international dispute over Iran's nuclear programme can still be resolved by peaceful means.
I, for one, wish that the Iranian population were armed to the teeth .....
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